Shortly after becoming the German war-games champion, Udo Berger and his girlfriend Ingeborg holiday on the Catalonian Costa Brava, where they meet another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, and a band of shady locals, in this posthumous novel from the author of 2666 and The Savage Detectives. When Charly disappears without a trace, Udo's well-ordered life is shaken to the core and he refuses to leave, even after Ingeborg returns home. As his increasingly feverish dreams push him toward delirium, Udo tries to steady himself by engaging the enigmatic beach hermit El Quemado in a days-long match of the classic Avalon Hill board game The Rise and Decline of the Third Reich. Too late, Udo realizes that the consequences of this game are far more serious than he imagined. Presented in this handsome slipcased edition, Roberto Bolaņo's early novel was found among his papers and translated in 2011 by Natasha Wimmer. It originally appeared in English in the Paris Review, who deemed it a precursor to his later works: "From the first sentence, The Third Reich bears his hallmarks. The irony, the atmosphere of erotic anxiety, the dream logic shading into nightmare, the feckless, unreliable narrator: all prefigure his later work. The young novelist must have been exhilarated, and possibly alarmed, to discover his talent so fully formed."